The Edge of the Ocean
by karebear
Summary: "You're dead." "So are you. Well, maybe." Conclusion to the trilogy that began with "Any Port" and "Undertow" - femShep/Kaidan, beginning of ME2.


"_At the edge of the ocean, we can start over again."  
_- Ivy, "Edge of the Ocean"

Frantic voices wake her, a roaring in her ears like a crashing surf, and a chaotic beeping that flashes along with the lights.

"Oh my God, Miranda. I think she's waking up."

She feels pain, all-encompassing and violent, fire licking through her raw nerves, yet it feels distant all the same. Panic and confusion overtake her. She can't _see_, nothing but the unnaturally bright light searing into eyelids that refuse to focus. She pushes out with every instinct she can summon, tries to cry, to cough, to speak.

Someone grabs her flailing hand before she can get anywhere. "Shepard, don't try to move."

"It's not working!"

It hurts to breathe, she can't grab enough oxygen, her heartbeat races... and a heavy pressure pulls her back down. She scrambles for something to grab onto, comes up empty.

"Run the numbers again."

The waves crash and pull her under again. She fights against it, but loses.

She draws in another shallow breath and there is nothing anymore but white light and silence.

She blinks again, feeling uneasy, _unreal_. Nervous tension threads through her blood, collecting into a knotted coil under her ribcage. She strains to hear something, to give her some clue as to where she is. There's nothing except for a salty tang to the atmosphere, moisture clinging to her skin. No voices. Gray shadows that slowly come together, she is looking at the world through a hazy fog.

Slowly, she begins to feel more solid. Water laps at her feet. She can feel the grit of the cool, dark sand under her bare feet.

The flesh at the back of her neck crawls with the absolutely _certain_ awareness that someone is watching her. She spins around, her heart beating faster. Her hand reaches for the gun that should be strapped at her hip, but comes up empty.

She hasn't gone anywhere without a gun since she was sixteen. The profound sense of _wrongness_ continues.

"You planning to shoot me, Janey?"

The voice echoes off of close walls that don't exist here, threatening to swallow her. The crashing waves grow louder.

Nausea churns in her stomach and she almost chokes, responding to the voice before she sees him.

"Kaidan," she whispers.

He is _there_, suddenly, in front of her, strong and solid. He looks up and smiles sadly, not quite meeting her eyes, shrugging away. He's still wearing the standard-issue Alliance light armor, though it's far from parade quality at the moment. It's scorched and dented, some pieces blasted off entirely. The exposed skin visible beneath it is raw and ripped open; bloody and bruised. The familiar dancing web of biotic sparks surrounds him. He glances up, and his eyes are cold and hardened.

Shepard swallows hard.

"Kaidan, I -"

"Don't apologize," he demands harshly, and she freezes in her tracks. She nods, slowly.

He blows out a slow, careful breath. "Commander, it... it wasn't your decision. If you'd been there, we'd still have needed to trigger the bomb early. There were too many Geth. The Normandy couldn't have made that evac. You got out. You got out and Ash got out. It was the right call and... I don't regret it." He freezes again, throws a glance back in her direction and shakes his head. "Well, not much."

Shepard takes another step closer to him, but just one. He doesn't move. She's still too far away to touch him, and somehow she knows that this is the way it's supposed to be.

"You're..."

"Dead," he finishes, his lip quirking up into a wry smile. "So are you. Well, maybe. Hard to tell, at this point." He shrugs, taking a few more steps along the edge of the water. "Seems like a waste, doesn't it?"

She shakes her head fiercely, knowing he's wrong. How can she be _dead_? She can feel her heart beating, she is acutely aware of the air flowing into her lungs with every breath she takes. She can _feel_ her body responding to his presence, with squirming heat. She glances up again, to meet his dark eyes, hidden mostly by shadow.

"Kaidan..."

"You don't remember, do you?"

_Remember what?_

She scrambles backward, her fingers clawing for purchase against the slick, rain-soaked metal of the fire escape. Panic seizes her chest as her hand slips. Blood oozes up from her lower lip as she bites it accidentally. Pain rattles through her muscles and bones, the shock of impact after the fall.

The fall.

She glances up to where the dark-skinned boy glares menacingly down at her. Up, to the roof of the six-story building.

She grins, the rush of unusual power still crashing over her.

A surge of biotic energy, the spike of potential that she can shape. She laughs, hauling herself to her feet. Blood trails from deep gashes where rough concrete and jagged splinters of metal and wood had caught her. Her head pounds, her muscles ache with a deep throbbing, but she is alive, _walking_.

The biotic barrier wraps tightly around her, its purple-blue halo lighting up the darkened alleyway.

"You can't touch me," she demands. "I'll kill you!"

Her voice shakes only a little. She stills herself before her trembling body can give away her fear. She turns and begins to limp away, to _run_, because that was she does.

"Kid, wait."

She spins around again, as the skinny teenager scales the rickety metal ladder after her.

She stops, smiles again, stuffing her hands into her pockets in tight fists as she waits for him to catch up to her. Nobody's ever wanted her before.

She'd followed him, the boy who controlled a corner and then a block and then a neighborhood. The boy who held her in his hand and controlled _her_, with vials in the darkness, with a gun, with other things.

Yes, she remembers dying. What she can't find is the memory of what it was like to be alive.

The piercing dirty yellow of the flickering shattered streetlight punched through the darkness of the tiny empty room where Marlo slept. He snorted and rolled over, and Janey curled her knees close to her chest and watched him. She reached out for the gun peeking out from under his pillow. She'd lashed out and grabbed it quickly, her heart hammering underneath her rib cage.

She'd known that if he'd woken up and seen her with it, he'd have killed her. Well, he'd have tried... but she _probably_ could've taken him down first. Maybe.

She'd turned the gun over in her hand and weighed the possibilities in her mind. It helped divert the focus away from the pain still screaming in her body. When he'd climbed on top of her in the middle of the night, she'd _thrown_ him away from her, slamming him against the cinderblock wall with invisible force. He'd recovered quickly though - too quickly - spitting out a bloody, broken tooth and calling one of his lieutenants to hold her down while he silenced her protests with slaps and punches and took what he wanted anyway.

She let him, knowing what to expect, knowing how to survive it. Marlo thought he was tough, but by the age of twelve she'd already been through two foster fathers and an overnight in juvenile lockup with a vindictive bastard of a prison guard who'd held a special hatred for biotics. Eventually - reluctantly - she'd let go of the gun, shoving it under the mattress before slipping out onto the fire escape to sit in the winter cold and wait for morning.

_"Wake up, Commander. Shepard, get out of that bed, this facility is under attack."_

It's the overwhelming insistence of the voice that pierces through before the meaning. She struggles to sit up, to stand up, to stumble over to the locker shoved into the corner of the sterile white room.

_Medbay_, whispers some voice out of memory. She pulls on armor with rote movements, responding to sound and stimuli without processing any of it. Steady, pulsing beeps. High-pitched squeals. The patter of automatic gunfire. Her fingers close around the grip of the Alliance-issue pistol: not _her _gun - this one is too new, unmodded, unmarked - but familiar enough. She falls into the careful ready stance and clings to cover, and as the fog in her head starts to clear the empty space fills with questions: Where is she? Where is everyone else? Who is this voice that thinks it can order her around? And why the fuck are there squads of security mechs shooting at her?

"Commander, you were dead," the mercenary in Cerberus armor tells her flatly.

Not anymore, though.

She nods slowly, and accepts the soldier's helping hand. The gun in her hand feels solid. The flares of biotic energy that ebb and flow in tandem between them feels familiar. She focuses on those things. She resolves not to let the echoing roar of waves and fire grow any louder. She pushes it down, along with the confusion and panicked doubt. She shoots at the synthetic bodies that are shooting at her, because the motions of survival are ingrained in her. She blocks out the voices that try to explain things, she shakes off their questions, and she _doesn't_ trust anything they say. That, too, is habit that cannot be killed.

On the shuttle, in the aftermath, as the engine drives rumble underneath her feet, she insist that she feels fine and she doesn't care that these people must know she's lying. They've put their guns away, but she still holds hers. Not pointed at them, not _quite_, but she will not let go of it either.

The scientist - Miranda - watches her the way Marlo once had: she doesn't see a person, but a pet, a tool, a body under her control. She insists on asking questions. Shepard shrugs and refuses to answer.

"Virmire," the woman presses. "You had to sacrifice one of your crew. Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko was killed in action."

Tears sting Shepard's eyes and images and _feeling _crash over her, stimuli lighting through her synapses: searing heat, licking flames. Mushroom clouds. The echo of her panicked breathing, hopeless flailing against the darkness. Pain. And emptiness. And bright, piercing light.

Kaidan's voice in her ear, his arms around her, holding her close without hesitation or expectation, offering the comfort that she'd never known how to ask for, that she doesn't _deserve_.

"I remember," she whispers.

She draws in a shaky breath and hopes her spastic response to the deliberate push against every emotional wound she has wasn't as obvious as she's certain it was.

"We're done," Jacob hisses. Next to him, Miranda frowns, but she nods and settles back into the leather seat without another word. Shepard doesn't look at either one of them.

She closes her eyes and hears Kaidan's voice echoing in her head. She knows it couldn't have been real, but it anchors itself into her stomach, a hollow guilt and a screaming rage. She swims in it in the privacy behind the shields these Cerberus scientists will never punch through.

She stares out the thick window, hardened plexiglass between her and the stars where she should've died. Where she _did _die.

_Seems like a waste, doesn't it?_

She nods, a response to the question they didn't ask.

Two years, four billion credits... she knows she isn't worth it.

She damn well knows who it should have been.


End file.
